M365Clarity · Change Management
Most Microsoft Teams rollouts follow the same pattern. IT deploys Teams, sends an announcement email, and waits. Two months later, adoption sits at 35% and the rest of the organisation is still emailing each other.
That 35% figure is not random — it is roughly the proportion of early adopters in any workplace who will pick up a new tool without being pushed. The remaining 65% need a reason, a nudge, and a moment of early success. They are not resistant to Teams. They just have not had a reason to switch yet.
This post is a practical campaign you can run as an IT admin or MSP, without budget for a dedicated change manager and without a six-month project plan.
Before running a campaign, it helps to know which problem you are solving. Teams adoption usually stalls for one of three reasons, and each needs a different response.
Reason 1 — The tool has not been configured to replace existing habits. If users can still send emails just as easily as sending a Teams message, they will send emails. The path of least resistance wins. Configuration changes — setting Teams as the default calling app, disabling the old phone system, making channel notifications work properly — create the friction that shifts habits.
Reason 2 — Users do not know what Teams is for. Many users think Teams is a video conferencing tool and nothing more. They already have Zoom. They do not understand that Teams is also their persistent chat, their file store, their meetings, their project rooms, and eventually their phone. Adoption campaigns that explain the full picture tend to work better than ones that focus on a single feature.
Reason 3 — No one ever made it personal. Generic emails about a new IT system get ignored. Adoption accelerates when a person in the same team — not IT — says "here is how I use this every day and here is why it is better." That is the role of a Teams champion, and it is the single highest-leverage investment in a Teams campaign.
A campaign will not stick if the underlying configuration works against it. Before investing any effort in comms or training, verify three things in your tenant.
First, ensure Teams is set as the default app for calls and meetings. If users still have Skype for Business or a legacy PBX as their default phone, they will default to that when they need to call someone. In Teams Admin Centre, confirm that the coexistence mode is set to Teams Only for all users.
Second, check your Teams meeting policies. If recording is disabled or external guests cannot join, users who try to replace existing meeting habits will hit friction immediately. Amber or unknown meeting policy settings are a signal that this has not been done.
Third, confirm that Teams notifications are set to meaningful defaults. Many users mute Teams notifications in the first week because the defaults are too noisy, then never re-enable them. Setting quiet hours and activity-based notification defaults in Teams Admin Centre avoids this problem before it starts.
Check your Teams configuration before you campaign. If meeting policies, external access, or calling settings are on defaults or unconfigured, sort those first. A campaign that drives users to a misconfigured Teams experience does more harm than no campaign at all.
This is a four-week structured campaign for organisations of 20 to 500 users. It is designed to be run by one person alongside their normal IT work, taking roughly two to three hours per week.
Look at your Teams activity report and identify two things: users who are already actively using Teams (your potential champions) and the departments or teams with the lowest adoption. Champions should be people who use Teams daily and are respected by their peers — not necessarily technical people. Ask two or three of them if they will spend fifteen minutes a week answering questions from colleagues about Teams for the next month. Most will say yes. Then send a personalised email to the heads of the low-adoption departments. Not a generic announcement — a specific message noting that their team is using Teams at X% and asking for fifteen minutes to walk them through what their team would use it for.
Pick one low-adoption team and run a thirty-minute session with them focused on one specific use case: replacing their weekly status update email with a Teams channel post. Walk them through creating a channel, posting an update, and how to reply. Do not try to explain everything about Teams in this session. One use case that sticks is worth more than a complete feature tour that nobody remembers. At the end of the session, ask the manager to move their next weekly update from email to Teams. That one decision creates a forcing function for the whole team.
Write a short internal email or intranet post from the perspective of one of your champions. Not "here are five features of Microsoft Teams" — "here is what I used to do and here is what I do now." A real example from someone in the building is significantly more persuasive than anything IT sends. Keep it to three paragraphs. End with one question: what is one thing you currently do by email that you think could work better in Teams? Invite replies. This signals that the campaign is a conversation, not a broadcast.
Pull the Teams activity report again and compare it to week one. Share the change with leadership — even a small increase makes the campaign feel real and worth continuing. If adoption has improved in the pilot team, write up what worked and share it with the other low-adoption departments. Set a recurring calendar reminder to check the adoption report monthly. Adoption campaigns that run once and stop usually see adoption drop back within two months. The monthly check keeps the pressure on and lets you catch new hires who have not been properly onboarded to Teams.
If you manage Teams on behalf of a client rather than for your own organisation, the same campaign structure applies but with two differences.
First, the champion needs to be an employee of the client, not you. The most effective champion is someone the other employees already respect and talk to daily. Your role is to brief and enable that person, not to be the face of the campaign yourself.
Second, the before-and-after measurement is a client deliverable. Documenting the improvement in Teams adoption over the campaign period — with specific numbers from the activity report — is evidence of the value your managed service provides. A client who can see that Teams adoption went from 34% to 67% over six weeks has a concrete reason to continue their contract.
Three signals tell you whether a Teams adoption campaign is having the right effect.
Active users in the Teams activity report should increase week over week during the campaign. If they do not move in the first two weeks, the campaign is not reaching the right people and you need to go more direct — individual conversations rather than broadcast emails.
The ratio of messages sent to meetings held should shift over time. Early Teams adopters tend to use it only for meetings. As adoption deepens, message activity increases. A high meetings-to-messages ratio means users are still using Teams as a Zoom replacement, not as a daily communication layer.
The number of active Teams channels should grow. Users who create or regularly use channels have embedded Teams into their workflow. Users who only join meetings and ignore channels are one step away from dropping Teams entirely when the novelty wears off.
M365Clarity shows you exactly how many users are actively using Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange against your licensed seat count — in under 30 seconds. Free to try.
Start free scan → View live demoRelated articles